See also: 1916 in literature, other events of 1917, 1918 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• June 4 - The very first Pulitzer Prizes are awarded: Laura E. Richards, Maude H. Elliott, and Florence Hall receive the first Pulitzer for a biography (for Julia Ward Howe). Jean Jules Jusserand receives the first Pulitzer for history for his work With Americans of Past and Present Days. Herbert B. Swope receives the first Pulitzer for journalism for his work for the New York World.
• December 25 - Why Marry?, first dramatic play to win a Pulitzer Prize, opens at the Astor Theatre in New York City.

New Books

• Canada at Flanders — Max Aitken
• A Daughter of the Morning — Zona Gale
• Ethiopia, The Land of Promise — Clayton Adams
• His Family — Ernest Poole
• The Homesteader — Oscar Micheaux
• The Job — Sinclair Lewis
• Knights of Araby — Marmaduke Pickthall
• The Leopard's Claw — George Washington Ellis
• The Man With Two Left Feet — P. G. Wodehouse
• Missing — Mary Augusta Ward
• On Growth and Form — D'Arcy Thompson
• Prufrock and Other Observations — T. S. Eliot
• The Rise of David Levinsky — Abraham Cahan
• South Wind — Norman Douglas
• Summer — Edith Wharton
• Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall — David Graham Phillips
• A Thorn in the Flesh — Rhoda Broughton
• The Three Black Pennys — Joseph Hergesheimer
• Towards the Goal — Mary Augusta Ward
• Under Fire — Henri Barbusse
• Under One Roof — Mary Cholmondeley

Births

• February 11 - Sidney Sheldon, novelist
• December 21 - Heinrich Böll, German author, Nobel Prize winner

Deaths

• January 15 - William de Morgan, novelist
• April 21 - Francis Burnand, dramatist and editor of "Punch"

Awards

• Nobel Prize for Literature: Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan